Why I Stopped Chasing the Trend Cycle
For about five years I rebuilt my portfolio every six months. New trend, new aesthetic, new "look" — neumorphism, glassmorphism, hand-drawn, brutalist, the AI-generated phase, the bento phase. I'd see something striking on Twitter or Dribbble, recognize my own work as suddenly outdated, and start over.
Around the time the trend cycle hit "claymorphism on top of bento layouts" — when I caught myself genuinely considering whether to redesign everything again — I noticed something. The work in my portfolio I was actually proud of, the work that had aged best, the work clients still pointed to as their favorite — none of it belonged to any of those trends. It belonged to none of them, and it had survived all of them.
That observation changed how I work. This is a note about what changed.
What the trend cycle actually is
It's important to be honest about what we mean by "design trends." They aren't really about how a thing should look. They're about how a portfolio should look, in order to be hired by people who hire based on what's trending.
That sounds cynical but it's mostly mechanical. A new visual style appears, a small number of high-status studios adopt it, the style starts showing up in hiring interviews as a positive signal, mid-tier designers start adopting it to remain hireable, the style saturates, status seekers move on, and the cycle restarts.
What gets lost is that none of this is about whether the style serves the user, or the product, or the problem. It's about whether the designer signals that they "know what's happening." That's a real thing — but it's a different goal than designing well.
Three things I started doing instead
1. I started reading much older work
For a year I more or less stopped looking at Dribbble. Instead I dug into older books — Müller-Brockmann's grid systems, Tschichold's The New Typography, Edward Tufte's whole shelf, the Yale Symphony Orchestra posters from the 70s. None of this is fashionable now. None of it was ever fashionable, really. It just works.
What surprised me was how much of "modern" design is just rediscovery. The 2024 minimalism revival is the 1960s Swiss school with rounded corners. The current obsession with "honest" UI is Bauhaus with a different vocabulary. Knowing the original makes you skeptical of the rerun.
2. I started designing for the sixth time someone uses the product
The trend cycle is optimized for first impressions. New visitors. Screenshots on social media. The wow moment.
But almost no design problem worth solving is a first-impression problem. Most of design is what happens on visit number six, when the novelty has worn off and the user is just trying to get something done. Visual style barely matters at that point. What matters is whether the layout cooperates with the task, whether the affordances are predictable, whether nothing surprises you in a bad way.
When I started weighting the sixth-visit experience as much as the first-visit experience, my designs got quieter. They got better.
3. I stopped redesigning things just because they were old
"It looks dated" is one of the easiest critiques to make and one of the worst reasons to act. Every design will eventually look dated. That's not a defect — that's how time works. The question worth asking is: is it doing its job? Is the user struggling with anything? Is there a real problem here, or is the only problem that I personally would design it differently today?
If there's no real problem, leaving it alone is the better design decision. Time spent redesigning things that work is time not spent on things that don't.
What I'm not saying
I'm not saying ignore the field. Visual culture moves and you need to stay in conversation with it — clients expect it, collaborators expect it, your own taste develops by seeing things. The point isn't to retreat into purity.
The point is to recognize that "what's trending" and "what's good" are two separate questions, and the field will pretend they're the same one. Periodically you have to do the work of answering them separately for yourself, in your own context, for the specific problem in front of you.
The portfolio I have now
I haven't redesigned my portfolio in about two years. The visual style is roughly Helvetica, generous spacing, very little color, almost no decoration. It looks like a half-dozen other minimalist portfolios you've seen.
I no longer worry that it doesn't look "current." It does its job. The work speaks for itself, or it doesn't. The frame around the work is just supposed to disappear. When I notice the frame, I know I've spent time on the wrong thing.
If you're in the middle of yet another portfolio rebuild, consider stopping. Not as a stand against trends — as an experiment in seeing what happens when you commit to something instead. A year of working on the work, instead of the wrapper, is a meaningful experiment. Most of the designers I admire most have done it at least once.